Customer Information Driven After Sales Service ... - RePub

2.7. After Sales Service at IBM - An Illustrative Case
after sales service operate and to highlight how the solutions that exist in the academic
literature are utilized in business practice for better understanding.
2.7 After Sales Service at IBM - An Illustrative Case
IBM after sales service is a frequently studied and cited case in academic literature as an
example of the state of the art in after sales service operations (Cohen et al., 1990; Hammond
and Dutkiewicz, 1993; Cohen et al., 1997; Fleischmann et al., 2003; Tang, 2005;
Draper and Suanet, 2005; Candas, 2007; Kutanoglu, 2008). Among these studies, we
would like to highlight Hammond and Dutkiewicz (1993). In this case study, the authors
discuss the execution of a typical after sales service operation at IBM in detail. Other
papers highlight spare parts inventory planning, network design, spare part returns management,
and field maintenance planning solutions at IBM. In the subsequent sections,
we discuss each of the after sales service operations and the associated optimization /
analytics solutions to support these operations.
IBM encounters a heterogeneous customer base for after sales service planning and
execution. Essentially, an IBM customer represents an installed machine at its premises
for which it owns a valid service contract. These machines include IBM products as well
as non-IBM products for which the customer holds a servicing contract from IBM. These
machines can be subdivided into following groupings:
• Large Scale Systems: These are large scale computing machines sold primarily in
the B2B sector. The customers are large organizations, governments and educational
institutions, who use these machines as a part of their business infrastructure.
• Medium Scale Systems: These are slightly smaller versions of the computing machine
(such as i Series). The primary target for these machine models is again
the B2B sector. However, the computing needs of these organization (in terms of
volume) do not match the users of the large scale system.
• Small Scale Systems: These are small scale machines such as personal computers,
POS systems, multiplexes, and modems. These machines are sold in B2C and
B2B sectors, however, in-terms of servicing, IBM only supports the B2B sector.
For example, the sale of the personal computer business to Lenovo led IBM to
49